There’s so many ways I can say a book is Neil Gaiman at his most quintessential. In this one, it’s the windy, rugged, tragic, disturbing, old and ancient oral narrative that typifies a Gaiman tale. The truth in this tale is the truth of our hearts—that each of us is driven by sorrow and anger and especially, yes, evil. That’s what makes a Gaiman story so compelling to me, that it is folktale at its purest—dark, charming, mystical, morally aware, and of course atmospheric, driven by a timeless awareness of the natural world and the intelligent energy that lives beyond the surface of the senses.